Entheogens in Human Origins Part Zero: Akers Vs. McKenna
by Skylin Thompson on Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 10:34am ·posted by technoshaman88 Created 05/24/2011 - 8:40pm
Visionary plants and psychotropic chemicals induce what many can only describe as profound mystical experiences. Rational-material assumptions about the nature of reality seem to dissolve before the eyes. The question becomes, what are these substances and how and why do they take us into perceptual dimensions above and beyond the familiar? Clues survive with tribes who revere plants like peyote, ayahuasca, and iboga as sacred visionary medicines. A widely regarded philosopher in this matter is Terence McKenna, who argues from history and anthropology that visionary plants, especially psilocybin mushrooms, were the very catalyst of human evolution and the birth of human consciousness.
In Concerning Terence McKenna’s Stoned Apes (http://www.realitysandwich.com/terence_mckennas_stoned_apes [1]), Brian Akers expresses his opinion that McKenna’s claims are misguided, likely motivated by his poor character, uninformed by and in contradiction to established science. I think a fair appraisal of Akers’s
work will help clarify the issue and refocus our inquiry into the true significance of visionary plants.
McKenna attempts to show benefits of psilocybin that would have favored the survival and prosperity of early hominids, thus resulting in the natural selection of a mushroom using tribe. Terence is fond of quoting a study by Fischer and Hill revealing improved visual acuity induced by low doses of psilocybin, which he reasons would have clearly favored psilocybin using hunters over non. Brain K. Akers debunks the crap out of that(ED_Well if he debunked it means nothing to me benjamin couwenberg as i have taken psilocybin at low dose and KNOW and see of the effect, its that effect where the trees all suddenly stand out from one another and apart from one another u seem to notice each one differently more and their personality asif meaning is jumping out of them suddenly.. ). Fischer and Hill’s studies actually suggest maladaptive effects on vision. I was skeptical, so I looked it up myself. Sure enough, Fischer reports: “(psilocybin) interferes with counterbalance to optical distortion or the expectation to see the world undistorted” (Cute, right?). Take that, McKenna fanatics! How now your impeccable hero? Consider Nietzsche:
“Verily, I advise you: depart from me, and guard yourselves against Zarathustra (McKenna)! And better still: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he hath deceived you…One requiteth a teacher badly if one remain merely a student. And why will ye not pluck at my wreath? Ye venerate me; but what if your veneration should someday collapse? Take heed lest a statue crush you!” (Thus Spake Zarathustra) (ED_crapola)
So, is the notion that entheogens (plants that generate the divine within) such as psilocybin mushrooms were implicit in the origin of human consciousness dead and festering as Akers claims? Not hardly. Fischer and Hill is noteworthy, but a studied perspective shows that Akers presentation of McKenna’s work is no more accurate than his claims about evolutionary biology, and evidence that entheogenic plants played an important role in the shaping of human cognition and culture go far beyond McKenna.
Akers asks, “how can it be that so many who know psilocybin's effects directly, personally -- and would therefore be able if not likely, one would think, to know what they've experienced -- fail to take pause at this (the suggestion that psilocybin sharpens visual acuity), or compare the 'fact' against the evidence of their own senses?” Eh em! SWIM has. Psilocybe azurescens showed him perfect crystalline stars in the night sky for the first time in his life, normally a blur to his 20/80 vision, a better focus by leaps and bounds then his best pair of glasses. It is definitely his experience that psilocybin works on all ocular dimensions, opening the third eye (pineal gland in modern anatomy or sixth chakra in Vedic science) as well as sharpening the clarity and acuity of regular eyesight, and certainly heightening awareness to nature and the presence of animals.
Because exploration has been repressed, scientific data on visionary plants is a shallow pool. A far better source for investigating the benefits of psychotropic medicine is tribal tradition. The Machiguenga apply the leaf juice of DMT potent Psychotria species to their eyes to sharpen the senses for hunting. Ayahuasca vine is used throughout the Amazon to bestow the hunting prowess of the jaguar. Plant shamans are even said to intercede with nature spirits that influence weather and migration and to use their medicine to divine the location of game.
Surely the most definitive adaptive benefit of shamanic sacraments is the curative power for which tribes worldwide honor them as sacred medicines. The formidable detoxifying and disinfectant properties of most visionary plants provide an immediate advantage to their users,
known to frequently bring initiates back from the verge of death, providing them time to learn the tribal science of shamanism, which involves communicating with all plants to learn their medicinal properties. Let’s keep in mind that according to evolutionary science, traits and behaviors become ubiquitous when environmental conditions prove their value for survival and reproductive success. Thus the widespread institutionalization of plant shamanism makes the natural selection of visionary plant use a foregone conclusion. The primary functions of sacred plants in tribal culture are medicinal use, ritual aid to hunting, and religio-spiritual communion. The question is not if, but when the use of visionary plants evolved into human culture.
McKenna suggests that increased sexual proclivity from psilocybin induced central nervous system arousal could have been an important selective factor particularly for hominids in the first stage of adopting the use of mushrooms. Akers ridicules, drawing analogy to a Discovery Chanel type scenario of breeding privilege won only in battle by the strongest lions, regardless of how aroused any of them might be. That violent competition is the basis of natural selection has surely been a popular idea since Darwin, even becoming the philosophical basis of Nazism. Evolutionary biologists, however, have long recognized that brute strength is only one selective factor operable in nature. Symbiosis can be as conducive to an organism’s survival as dominance, a sharper tooth no greater advantage then a thicker coat in a cold climate, or even a better mating song. Natural selection resulting from sexual preference rather than competition has its own name in evolutionary biology: intersexual selection. Take the peacock, whose bold colors make him more vulnerable in the hunting world but whose intricate plumage nevertheless favors him for reproductive success for no other reason than the aesthetic preference of peahens.
Evolutionary biologist Michael Garfield comments on Akers:
“Reproductive success has as much or more to do with the desire to reproduce as it does with successful acts of aggression - in direct contrast to what you seem to suggest with your inelegant comparison of human evolution to lion evolution (which operates under a completely different set of social constraints). You're referencing a century-old and woefully obsolete model of natural selection, which assumes violent competition is the strongest selective factor. On the contrary, early humanity was almost certainly a tightly-woven, largely un-individuated social milieu that would have rewarded facile communication and playful eroticism as much or more than dominance. Take a look at the literature on beta males; most of the reproduction in primate societies actually occurs under the nose of the dominant aggressive males, by males who spend more time grooming and communicating with the females.”
So surely aphrodisiacs could favor the natural selection of hominids, and more importantly, the cultural inclusion of psilocybin could help explain the divergence of sexual relations that took place sometime between male dominated primate society and modern culture, patterns of gender balance, Gaia/goddess worship, and matriarchy that prevailed until agriculture and the alphabet.
Akers still knows better. His expertise in evolutionary biology informs him that only genetic variations can be passed onto future generations. “TM never proposed a gene for eat psilocybin,” did he? (The wise professor Akers doesn’t “teach” his students. Instead he exposes them to radiation, hoping to produce an anomalous mutation that gives rise to inheritable understanding.) Non-genetically encoded inheritance is as apparent as language, tradition, education, and
technology. Is there a gene for build Ford trucks? No, but we do it, and we pass down and adapt the method through our many learned, not innate, memory systems: school, the spoken word, media, etc. It was none other than eminent Darwinist Richard Dawkins who coined the term “meme:” a cultural item transmitted through repetition in a manor analogous to the transmission of genes. It is no stretch to extend cultural evolution from primate society either in which many behaviors are learned and taught, even use of simple tools in some species.
Akers triumphantly belittles McKenna’s “antiquated Lamarckian ideas.” He ignores arguments from epigenetics as desperate attempts to resuscitate a theory he thinks he’s already refuted. Regardless of McKenna, however, the emerging field of epigenetics is rapidly disproving the belief that environmental influences can’t change inheritance. Incidentally, McKenna’s theory that diet plays a major role in epigenetic change was radical, scarcely suggested in literature at the time of the compilation of Food of the Gods, but in the last decade epigenetics have come so far in identifying inheritance from ancestral diet that dietary advice is now being marketed to pregnant women to ensure good epigenetic transfer to their children. In any case, Food of the Gods contains a whole chapter entitled, “Steering Clear of Lamarck,” in which McKenna cites the exact same giraffe example as Akers. I quote:
“An objection to these ideas inevitably arises and should be dealt with. This scenario of human emergence may seem to smack of Lamarckism, which theorizes that characteristics acquired by an organism during its lifetime can be passed on to its progeny. The classic example is the claim that giraffes have long necks because they stretch their necks to reach high branches […] The short answer to this objection, one that requires no defense of Lamarck's ideas, is that the presence of psilocybin in the hominid diet changed the parameters of the process of natural selection by changing the behavioral patterns upon which that selection was operating […] psilocybin-using individuals evolved epigenetic rules or cultural forms that enabled them to survive and reproduce better than other individuals. Eventually the more successful epigenetically based styles of behavior spread through the populations along with the genes that reinforce them. In this fashion the population would evolve genetically and culturally.” (Food of the Gods, page 20,21)
Certainly a proper assessment of a theory would include engagement of the author’s argument about it, but Akers is already done with McKenna’s hopeless Lamarckism and continuing on about the ramifications of McKenna’s irrationality. Half way through his fifty-three paragraph essay, Akers has led us through numerous pontifications on McKenna’s deceitful, manipulative, ambiguous, subversive, unscientific, immoral, absurd, and confusing nature. So far he’s presented only one actual claim against the “stoned apes” theory: that is in his professional opinion, McKenna doesn’t reference adequate paleoanthropology (study of human fossils). Well, McKenna quotes the age and brain size of Homo africanus, Homo boisei, Homo robustus, homo habilis, homo erectus and the emergence of homo sapiens in Africa around 100,000 years ago, according to the consensus of modern primatologists. From this point on little physiological change has thought to have taken place in our ancestors; our unique modern features evolved culturally, so McKenna deals primarily with anthropology, archeology, and history from this point on. What paleoanthropology related issue to you feel was omitted, Brian? Akers cites McKenna only once, in reference to visual acuity. He doesn’t begin to synopsize the book he says he’s basing his challenge on. His presumption that visual acuity and horniness are the
cornerstones of McKenna’s theory is silly to anyone who’s read Food of the Gods. Indeed, these selective factors are centralized in McKenna’s summative lectures, and are never mentioned except in conjunction with the most important adaptive advantage of psilocybin, language acquisition.
Evolutionary science offers few hypotheses for the rapid emergence of humanities most district traits such as abstract thought, symbolic language, and religious sentiment. McKenna points to the divine language producing mushroom. New research by New Zealand researcher Quentin Atkinson suggests that human speech originated only once in sub-Saharan Africa, quite consistent with McKenna’s Psilocybe cubensis in the grasslands scenario. It is well documented that psilocybin, even by comparison to other psychedelics, has a tendency to induce glossolalia, song, word, and mediation of Logos, seen clearly in the ritual use of mushrooms among the Mazatec. Mazatecan shamans are known as men of the word. It is said the mushroom speaks through the shaman, who sings and speaks for most of his healing sessions, calling down the wisdom of the supernatural world.
The iboga using Bwiti say consciousness is a plant characteristic gifted to humans by “master teacher plants.” They say they learned the use of iboga through observation of the pygmies who learned it from animals. (Jaguars eat ayahuasca leaves, and reindeer eat amanita muscaria.) Through SWIM’s experience, I’m well inclined to believe the Bwiti that human consciousness itself was indeed originally derived from visionary plants. I think it’s quite likely that psilocybin mushrooms in particular were the progenitors of human speech. Probably we learned plant use from animals. Ironically, I don’t believe humans evolved from stoned primates. I believe in (gasp) Intelligent Design.
My challenge in engaging Akers is that I also happened to disagree with the “stoned apes” premise. I still think Akers is worth refuting for several reasons. One, he’s not even a good teacher of Darwinism. His statements about the scientific understanding of evolution are consistently inaccurate. Two, though Akers claims to be a specialist of ethnobotany and shamanism, he makes no attempt to offer any constructive ideas in these fields and has basically nothing to report but how troubling McKenna and his “believers” are. His accusations that Reality sandwich commentators are exhibiting hostile dogmatic cultism by challenging his authority are rather distasteful and worth showing for empty. Three, McKenna and his ideas have every right to be considered thoughtfully. Despite contention with the stoning of apes, I still find Food of the Gods a highly compelling probe into the relevance of shamanic medicine and the question of human origins. To read only Akers one would have no notion that McKenna’s primate evolution theory is only a subplot of a book whose main theme is the juxtaposition of pre-literate shamanic culture and the historical legacy of substance abuse in which we still find ourselves mired. One of McKenna’s interesting suggestions is that our nostalgia for Edenic paradise is rooted in ancestral memory of an earth honoring, gender-balanced, partnership society grounded in ecstatic communion with sacred plants.
So this had been Entheogens in Human Origins Part Zero, because I haven’t yet been able to focus directly on my opinions about human origins while making the point that McKenna’s evolution hypotheses actually do dovetail beautifully with contemporary Neo-Darwinism. Join me next time for Entheogens in Human Origins Part One: Challenging Darwin (title tentative).
(ED_benjamin couwneberg_ .. sigh... u just cannot measure the universe with the neural net of a monkey.. ;) )
by Skylin Thompson on Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 10:34am ·posted by technoshaman88 Created 05/24/2011 - 8:40pm
Visionary plants and psychotropic chemicals induce what many can only describe as profound mystical experiences. Rational-material assumptions about the nature of reality seem to dissolve before the eyes. The question becomes, what are these substances and how and why do they take us into perceptual dimensions above and beyond the familiar? Clues survive with tribes who revere plants like peyote, ayahuasca, and iboga as sacred visionary medicines. A widely regarded philosopher in this matter is Terence McKenna, who argues from history and anthropology that visionary plants, especially psilocybin mushrooms, were the very catalyst of human evolution and the birth of human consciousness.
In Concerning Terence McKenna’s Stoned Apes (http://www.realitysandwich.com/terence_mckennas_stoned_apes [1]), Brian Akers expresses his opinion that McKenna’s claims are misguided, likely motivated by his poor character, uninformed by and in contradiction to established science. I think a fair appraisal of Akers’s
work will help clarify the issue and refocus our inquiry into the true significance of visionary plants.
McKenna attempts to show benefits of psilocybin that would have favored the survival and prosperity of early hominids, thus resulting in the natural selection of a mushroom using tribe. Terence is fond of quoting a study by Fischer and Hill revealing improved visual acuity induced by low doses of psilocybin, which he reasons would have clearly favored psilocybin using hunters over non. Brain K. Akers debunks the crap out of that(ED_Well if he debunked it means nothing to me benjamin couwenberg as i have taken psilocybin at low dose and KNOW and see of the effect, its that effect where the trees all suddenly stand out from one another and apart from one another u seem to notice each one differently more and their personality asif meaning is jumping out of them suddenly.. ). Fischer and Hill’s studies actually suggest maladaptive effects on vision. I was skeptical, so I looked it up myself. Sure enough, Fischer reports: “(psilocybin) interferes with counterbalance to optical distortion or the expectation to see the world undistorted” (Cute, right?). Take that, McKenna fanatics! How now your impeccable hero? Consider Nietzsche:
“Verily, I advise you: depart from me, and guard yourselves against Zarathustra (McKenna)! And better still: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he hath deceived you…One requiteth a teacher badly if one remain merely a student. And why will ye not pluck at my wreath? Ye venerate me; but what if your veneration should someday collapse? Take heed lest a statue crush you!” (Thus Spake Zarathustra) (ED_crapola)
So, is the notion that entheogens (plants that generate the divine within) such as psilocybin mushrooms were implicit in the origin of human consciousness dead and festering as Akers claims? Not hardly. Fischer and Hill is noteworthy, but a studied perspective shows that Akers presentation of McKenna’s work is no more accurate than his claims about evolutionary biology, and evidence that entheogenic plants played an important role in the shaping of human cognition and culture go far beyond McKenna.
Akers asks, “how can it be that so many who know psilocybin's effects directly, personally -- and would therefore be able if not likely, one would think, to know what they've experienced -- fail to take pause at this (the suggestion that psilocybin sharpens visual acuity), or compare the 'fact' against the evidence of their own senses?” Eh em! SWIM has. Psilocybe azurescens showed him perfect crystalline stars in the night sky for the first time in his life, normally a blur to his 20/80 vision, a better focus by leaps and bounds then his best pair of glasses. It is definitely his experience that psilocybin works on all ocular dimensions, opening the third eye (pineal gland in modern anatomy or sixth chakra in Vedic science) as well as sharpening the clarity and acuity of regular eyesight, and certainly heightening awareness to nature and the presence of animals.
Because exploration has been repressed, scientific data on visionary plants is a shallow pool. A far better source for investigating the benefits of psychotropic medicine is tribal tradition. The Machiguenga apply the leaf juice of DMT potent Psychotria species to their eyes to sharpen the senses for hunting. Ayahuasca vine is used throughout the Amazon to bestow the hunting prowess of the jaguar. Plant shamans are even said to intercede with nature spirits that influence weather and migration and to use their medicine to divine the location of game.
Surely the most definitive adaptive benefit of shamanic sacraments is the curative power for which tribes worldwide honor them as sacred medicines. The formidable detoxifying and disinfectant properties of most visionary plants provide an immediate advantage to their users,
known to frequently bring initiates back from the verge of death, providing them time to learn the tribal science of shamanism, which involves communicating with all plants to learn their medicinal properties. Let’s keep in mind that according to evolutionary science, traits and behaviors become ubiquitous when environmental conditions prove their value for survival and reproductive success. Thus the widespread institutionalization of plant shamanism makes the natural selection of visionary plant use a foregone conclusion. The primary functions of sacred plants in tribal culture are medicinal use, ritual aid to hunting, and religio-spiritual communion. The question is not if, but when the use of visionary plants evolved into human culture.
McKenna suggests that increased sexual proclivity from psilocybin induced central nervous system arousal could have been an important selective factor particularly for hominids in the first stage of adopting the use of mushrooms. Akers ridicules, drawing analogy to a Discovery Chanel type scenario of breeding privilege won only in battle by the strongest lions, regardless of how aroused any of them might be. That violent competition is the basis of natural selection has surely been a popular idea since Darwin, even becoming the philosophical basis of Nazism. Evolutionary biologists, however, have long recognized that brute strength is only one selective factor operable in nature. Symbiosis can be as conducive to an organism’s survival as dominance, a sharper tooth no greater advantage then a thicker coat in a cold climate, or even a better mating song. Natural selection resulting from sexual preference rather than competition has its own name in evolutionary biology: intersexual selection. Take the peacock, whose bold colors make him more vulnerable in the hunting world but whose intricate plumage nevertheless favors him for reproductive success for no other reason than the aesthetic preference of peahens.
Evolutionary biologist Michael Garfield comments on Akers:
“Reproductive success has as much or more to do with the desire to reproduce as it does with successful acts of aggression - in direct contrast to what you seem to suggest with your inelegant comparison of human evolution to lion evolution (which operates under a completely different set of social constraints). You're referencing a century-old and woefully obsolete model of natural selection, which assumes violent competition is the strongest selective factor. On the contrary, early humanity was almost certainly a tightly-woven, largely un-individuated social milieu that would have rewarded facile communication and playful eroticism as much or more than dominance. Take a look at the literature on beta males; most of the reproduction in primate societies actually occurs under the nose of the dominant aggressive males, by males who spend more time grooming and communicating with the females.”
So surely aphrodisiacs could favor the natural selection of hominids, and more importantly, the cultural inclusion of psilocybin could help explain the divergence of sexual relations that took place sometime between male dominated primate society and modern culture, patterns of gender balance, Gaia/goddess worship, and matriarchy that prevailed until agriculture and the alphabet.
Akers still knows better. His expertise in evolutionary biology informs him that only genetic variations can be passed onto future generations. “TM never proposed a gene for eat psilocybin,” did he? (The wise professor Akers doesn’t “teach” his students. Instead he exposes them to radiation, hoping to produce an anomalous mutation that gives rise to inheritable understanding.) Non-genetically encoded inheritance is as apparent as language, tradition, education, and
technology. Is there a gene for build Ford trucks? No, but we do it, and we pass down and adapt the method through our many learned, not innate, memory systems: school, the spoken word, media, etc. It was none other than eminent Darwinist Richard Dawkins who coined the term “meme:” a cultural item transmitted through repetition in a manor analogous to the transmission of genes. It is no stretch to extend cultural evolution from primate society either in which many behaviors are learned and taught, even use of simple tools in some species.
Akers triumphantly belittles McKenna’s “antiquated Lamarckian ideas.” He ignores arguments from epigenetics as desperate attempts to resuscitate a theory he thinks he’s already refuted. Regardless of McKenna, however, the emerging field of epigenetics is rapidly disproving the belief that environmental influences can’t change inheritance. Incidentally, McKenna’s theory that diet plays a major role in epigenetic change was radical, scarcely suggested in literature at the time of the compilation of Food of the Gods, but in the last decade epigenetics have come so far in identifying inheritance from ancestral diet that dietary advice is now being marketed to pregnant women to ensure good epigenetic transfer to their children. In any case, Food of the Gods contains a whole chapter entitled, “Steering Clear of Lamarck,” in which McKenna cites the exact same giraffe example as Akers. I quote:
“An objection to these ideas inevitably arises and should be dealt with. This scenario of human emergence may seem to smack of Lamarckism, which theorizes that characteristics acquired by an organism during its lifetime can be passed on to its progeny. The classic example is the claim that giraffes have long necks because they stretch their necks to reach high branches […] The short answer to this objection, one that requires no defense of Lamarck's ideas, is that the presence of psilocybin in the hominid diet changed the parameters of the process of natural selection by changing the behavioral patterns upon which that selection was operating […] psilocybin-using individuals evolved epigenetic rules or cultural forms that enabled them to survive and reproduce better than other individuals. Eventually the more successful epigenetically based styles of behavior spread through the populations along with the genes that reinforce them. In this fashion the population would evolve genetically and culturally.” (Food of the Gods, page 20,21)
Certainly a proper assessment of a theory would include engagement of the author’s argument about it, but Akers is already done with McKenna’s hopeless Lamarckism and continuing on about the ramifications of McKenna’s irrationality. Half way through his fifty-three paragraph essay, Akers has led us through numerous pontifications on McKenna’s deceitful, manipulative, ambiguous, subversive, unscientific, immoral, absurd, and confusing nature. So far he’s presented only one actual claim against the “stoned apes” theory: that is in his professional opinion, McKenna doesn’t reference adequate paleoanthropology (study of human fossils). Well, McKenna quotes the age and brain size of Homo africanus, Homo boisei, Homo robustus, homo habilis, homo erectus and the emergence of homo sapiens in Africa around 100,000 years ago, according to the consensus of modern primatologists. From this point on little physiological change has thought to have taken place in our ancestors; our unique modern features evolved culturally, so McKenna deals primarily with anthropology, archeology, and history from this point on. What paleoanthropology related issue to you feel was omitted, Brian? Akers cites McKenna only once, in reference to visual acuity. He doesn’t begin to synopsize the book he says he’s basing his challenge on. His presumption that visual acuity and horniness are the
cornerstones of McKenna’s theory is silly to anyone who’s read Food of the Gods. Indeed, these selective factors are centralized in McKenna’s summative lectures, and are never mentioned except in conjunction with the most important adaptive advantage of psilocybin, language acquisition.
Evolutionary science offers few hypotheses for the rapid emergence of humanities most district traits such as abstract thought, symbolic language, and religious sentiment. McKenna points to the divine language producing mushroom. New research by New Zealand researcher Quentin Atkinson suggests that human speech originated only once in sub-Saharan Africa, quite consistent with McKenna’s Psilocybe cubensis in the grasslands scenario. It is well documented that psilocybin, even by comparison to other psychedelics, has a tendency to induce glossolalia, song, word, and mediation of Logos, seen clearly in the ritual use of mushrooms among the Mazatec. Mazatecan shamans are known as men of the word. It is said the mushroom speaks through the shaman, who sings and speaks for most of his healing sessions, calling down the wisdom of the supernatural world.
The iboga using Bwiti say consciousness is a plant characteristic gifted to humans by “master teacher plants.” They say they learned the use of iboga through observation of the pygmies who learned it from animals. (Jaguars eat ayahuasca leaves, and reindeer eat amanita muscaria.) Through SWIM’s experience, I’m well inclined to believe the Bwiti that human consciousness itself was indeed originally derived from visionary plants. I think it’s quite likely that psilocybin mushrooms in particular were the progenitors of human speech. Probably we learned plant use from animals. Ironically, I don’t believe humans evolved from stoned primates. I believe in (gasp) Intelligent Design.
My challenge in engaging Akers is that I also happened to disagree with the “stoned apes” premise. I still think Akers is worth refuting for several reasons. One, he’s not even a good teacher of Darwinism. His statements about the scientific understanding of evolution are consistently inaccurate. Two, though Akers claims to be a specialist of ethnobotany and shamanism, he makes no attempt to offer any constructive ideas in these fields and has basically nothing to report but how troubling McKenna and his “believers” are. His accusations that Reality sandwich commentators are exhibiting hostile dogmatic cultism by challenging his authority are rather distasteful and worth showing for empty. Three, McKenna and his ideas have every right to be considered thoughtfully. Despite contention with the stoning of apes, I still find Food of the Gods a highly compelling probe into the relevance of shamanic medicine and the question of human origins. To read only Akers one would have no notion that McKenna’s primate evolution theory is only a subplot of a book whose main theme is the juxtaposition of pre-literate shamanic culture and the historical legacy of substance abuse in which we still find ourselves mired. One of McKenna’s interesting suggestions is that our nostalgia for Edenic paradise is rooted in ancestral memory of an earth honoring, gender-balanced, partnership society grounded in ecstatic communion with sacred plants.
So this had been Entheogens in Human Origins Part Zero, because I haven’t yet been able to focus directly on my opinions about human origins while making the point that McKenna’s evolution hypotheses actually do dovetail beautifully with contemporary Neo-Darwinism. Join me next time for Entheogens in Human Origins Part One: Challenging Darwin (title tentative).
(ED_benjamin couwneberg_ .. sigh... u just cannot measure the universe with the neural net of a monkey.. ;) )